For small business owners with a lot to do, is blogging worth the time spent? Can a company blog significantly contribute to the bottomline of a small business?
Let me say upfront that I have never had a successful blog or tried to use a blog to market a business. So, I can’t answer that question for you… yet.
But, I’m going to hypothesize that, yes, blogging can significantly contribute to the bottom line of most businesses. I have enough supporting evidence that I will be devoting a significant amount of my time to building a successful blog – and that’s a big risk considering the opportunity costs. One thing I do know, blogging is time-consuming!
The way I see it, a blog can exist:
- to support itself and it’s contributers (draw and monetize enough traffic to make it worthwhile),
- as a hobby (doesn’t matter whether it makes money),
- to bring in more money for a business (somehow redirect traffic from the blog into the company sales funnel resulting in conversions).
I am going to pursue the latter. My intent is to create a terrific productivity blog targeted toward micro and small businesses as this is the target market for my company, LongerDays.com Virtual Assistance. My hope is that such a blog will widen the net of keywords and phrases that can potentially bring someone to our website, that once they here on the blog they will become curious about our company, and finally that they will end up signing up for our virtual assistance service.
I will be building our blog up from nothing and I’m going to do it right before your eyes. Every week I will post an update on our traffic stats, rss subscribers, post frequency, referred sales, and probably some lessons learned along the way.
Where we are now:
Traffic: Less than 100 hits a week
RSS: 6 subscribers
Post frequency: Less than 1 a week
Sales referred: 0
If you have suggestions on other key metrics that I should be paying attention to, or you would find interesting, please let me know.
It may end up never creating a penny for us and if that’s the case, I’ll go back to posting on it only when I’m bored. My understanding is that it can take quite a while to build traffic so I’m not going to throw in the towel unnecessarily early…
UPDATE: 03/10/09
Traffic: Less than 100 hits a week
RSS: 2 subscribers!
Post frequency: About two a week
Sales referred: 0
Notes: I made a serious error this week – I changed my Feedburner URL When I realized this would break all my subscribers feeds and tried to change it back I got an error message that the URL was taken! So, we lost the majority of our subscribers which is frustrating but in the grand scheme of things, 4 is not many.
UPDATE: 11/24/09
Traffic: ~ 150 visitors a week
RSS subscribers: 9
Post frequency: 1 every 3 weeks
Sales referred: 0
Inbound links: 3
Notes: My failure to follow through on my blogging plans is instructive in itself. Blogging is time-consuming and, in the midst of trying to run a company, it is probably the first thing that will get pushed till tomorrow when it is still an unproven and under-performing method of generating leads.
I have noticed that the blog posts that bring in the most traffic are ones that review other services. My refined strategy is to focus on review posts to build traffic and intersperse other content only occasionally.
I don’t foresee the frequency of posts increasing any time soon – other things are just higher priority at the moment but, by not giving up, I hope to see traffic continue to increase gradually over time. After the traffic increases to a certain point – perhaps 100 visitors a day – I can see trying to monetize the traffic.
At the moment, there is no lead capture mechanism on the blog and there are no sales messages for our company. At this point, I just don’t feel the traffic justifies the time expense to set these things up especially when I don’t feel that the traffic we are getting are people interested in the service we offer.
We have gotten a few of deep links out of it and so far I count those as the only major benefit of the blogging I’ve done so far.
Update: 02/20/10:
Traffic: ~ 90 visitors / week
RSS: 14
Post frequency: Once monthly
Sales referred: 0 to company. $200 of affiliate commissions.
Inbound links: 6
Notes: Our traffic was growing steadily and then dropped off suddenly for some reason… probably something I did wrong to the backend of WordPress or perhaps due to a poorly executed server move. It’s coming back, slowly.
Update: 07/13/10
Traffic: ~ 160 visitors / week
RSS: 15
Post frequency: Twice monthly
Sales referred: 0 (directly) to company though one client did mention reading our blog before signing up for our service.
Inbound links: 2
Notes: While our traffic and RSS numbers are kind of discouraging considering our blog is almost two years old now, these pictures show an upward trend in spite of infrequent posts:
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Brian, for what is worth, I actually read your blog before subscribing for the services of Longerdays and it certainly made my decision easier after seeing that you were knowledgeable and wrote good posts. I believe blogs, if nothing else, provide assurance to readers about someone’s knowledge and personality.
I believe I found Longerdays through a blog post at PutThingsOff, so blogs can generate business in some way or another.